Wilson said it was “an honour”, adding: “Ever since my dad brainwashed me as a kid by playing The Dark Side of the Moon on repeat, Pink Floyd have been my favourite band. They are my Beatles, deeply ingrained in my musical DNA. I first saw Pompeii from a grainy print at a local cinema. It made an incredible impression on me with its untethered and exploratory rock music made by four musicians who seemed to epitomise the notion of intellectual cool.”

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NME awarded the ‘Pompeii – MCMLXXII’ concert film four stars in a review. It said, in part: “As such, Pink Floyd At Pompeii: MCMLXXII captures a moment that’s as bygone as the good citizens of Pompeii themselves. Here was an uncompromising, visionary band who, over the four years since losing their frontman Syd Barrett, had been given several avant-garde experimental albums to explore their new identity: 1970’s ‘Atom Heart Mother’, for instance, featured a cow on the cover and a roadie eating breakfast for 13 minutes.”

If the band holds the spot until Friday, they’ll add their latest release to their list of chart-topping albums, making the seventh alongside ‘Atom Heart Mother’ (1970), ‘Wish You Were Here’ (1975), ‘The Final Cut’ (1983), ‘The Division Bell’ (1994), ‘Pulse (Live)’ (1995) and ‘The Endless River’ (2014). This milestone would see the iconic British band make it on the list of other artists with the most UK number 1 albums such as George Michael or Blur.

In the midweek charts this week, Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album ‘Short’N’Sweet’ is making its was back up into the Top 3 whilst Ed Sheeran’s ‘+-=÷× (Tour Collection)’ re-enters the Top 5, pushed by the announcement of his eighth studio album ‘PLAY’ and the strong debut of his new single ‘Old Phone’. Erasure’s frontman Andy Bell’s first solo album ‘Ten Crows’ also made it in the Top 5, currently tracking at number 4 whilst singer-songwriter Andrew Cushin is aiming for his first Top 10 album with his latest release ‘Love Is For Everyone (10)’ with Alex Warren’s ‘You’ll Be Alright, Kid (Chapter 1)’ is following close behind at number 12.

Final chart positions will be confirmed this Friday by the Official Charts Company. The band’s movie is available for purchase of their official website.

The restoration effort uses the original 35mm footage, accompanied with newly mixed audio, courtesy of Steven Wilson. The 2025 version of the film will be the fourth iteration, and with the upcoming film featuring documentary footage of the band working on ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, it seems it will be a remaster of the 1974 edition, which was the most commercially successful cut too. The accompanying soundtrack album marks the first time that an album has been released alongside a theatrical cut too.

The film was directed by Adrian Maben, who also conceived of the project. Maben envisioned the would-be concert as an “anti-Woodstock”, where the amphitheater itself could be used as an instrument, and the band would play amongst the natural sounds of their environment. Drummer Nick Mason revealed that Maben described the idea as being “where there would be nobody present, and the music and the silence… would mean as much as, if not more than, a crowd of thousands.”

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Filmed in 1971 and released in 1972, the first version of the film featured just the performance. Two years later, at Maben’s suggestion, the film was recut, now including 20 minutes of documentary footage of the band in the studio recording ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’.. In 2002, a special director’s cut was released which introduced new edits, including footage from the Apollo missions, and heavily edited the setlist included from the performance, including omitting some songs entirely.   

The music video for the recently released ‘One Of These Days’ has racked up 300k views on YouTube in four days, and has been noted for its focus on the drumming of Nick Mason. One X user noticed the lack of footage of the rest of the band, which consisted of Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright, and Mason. Another Floyd fan responded that the original footage had been lost before the original cut had even been released. Still, the video gives one of rock’s greatest, yet often under-appreciated drummers, his dues.

  Despite the various revisions of the order in which the tracks appear in the film, ‘Echoes’ always bookends the film, with the first part always appearing as one of the opening two tracks, and part two as a finale. The accompanying soundtrack album seems to match the original cut’s track listing, meaning ‘Echoes – Part One’ will play after the opener, ‘Pompeii’. It also appears that all of the tracks have gone under a remastering process too, with all album tracks labeled as ‘2025 Mix’ on streaming platforms.

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Pink Floyd’s performance in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius remains one of the band’s many iconic moments, and has inspired a range of artists, including Radiohead, Beastie Boys (whose inspiration is evident in the music video for ‘Gratitude’), and even David Gilmour, who returned to the venue in 2018. In Nick Mason’s own words, the film is a “rare and unique document of the band performing live in the period prior to ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’”.